mohammad hadi abolhasani; niloofar pirestani; hajar amini
Abstract
Background and aim: water oil contamination has occurred in Iran since the previous century and environmental oil accumulation threatens the country water resources’ health. There are several methods to remove oil and its derivatives contamination. In the present study, mineral wool waste was used ...
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Background and aim: water oil contamination has occurred in Iran since the previous century and environmental oil accumulation threatens the country water resources’ health. There are several methods to remove oil and its derivatives contamination. In the present study, mineral wool waste was used as low price adsorbent for wastewater oil contamination (kerosene) removal. Materials and methods: first, XRF and XRD analyses were used to determine chemical composition. Then, adsorption tests were conducted discontinuously using laboratory solutions containing oil to determine optimum adsorption conditions by adjustment of effective factors such as pH, initial concentration, exposure time and adsorbent concentration. Thereafter, application of adsorbent for laboratory wastewater was studied. Results: after 15 min exposure, the adsorbent (mineral wool wastes) efficacy was significantly higher than the other times (76.01 % adsorption; P<0.05); whereas, the lowest efficacy was observed after 3 min (63.82 %; P<0.05). Among the tested pH, the highest and lowest adsorption were observed at pH = 3 (70.59 %; P<0.05) and 9 (57.69 %; P<0.05), respectively. There was no significant difference in adsorption between the adsorbent concentrations of 0.5 and 1 g (76.80 and 75.30 %); however, both were significantly (P<0.05) higher than the other concentrations. the lowest adsorption was observed at the concentration of 0.25 g adsorbent (67.78 %). Isotherm fitting of surface adsorption showed that oil adsorption by mineral wool wastes follows Langmuir model (R2=0.99). Conclusion: it is concluded that mineral wool waste has high efficiency to adsorb oil from wastewater and could be used for oil contamination removal.